Active and unique address from Ethereum present a threat to Bitcoin

Home » Active and unique address from Ethereum present a threat to Bitcoin

Ethereum is, in terms of market cap, the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world as well as claiming more unique and active addresses than its main competitor, Bitcoin.

Since December 2017, Ethereum has almost doubled in size and the Ethereum network is now host to 35 million unique addresses with an incredible 100,000 being logged each day. There is no doubt that these figures are pretty impressive but the growth of Ethereum nonetheless stands in the shadow of its previous all-time high of around 300,000 new addresses during January 2018. Since then it has tapered off as we moved into Q2 but its overall growth trend has not declined.

A blow to Bitcoin

Whilst its growth does deal a bit of a blow to Bitcoin, it’s important of these figures only apply to on-chain transactions. Those users that choose to make use of a centralised exchange such as Binance or Coinbase, often avoid using addresses entirely and are therefore not represented in the figures.

However, just because there are 35 million unique addresses, this does not mean that there are 35 million active users. Those that use the Ethereum network can have multiple addresses for the execution of smart contracts or transactions.

The number of unique addresses

To get a more accurate idea of user numbers we should consider looking at the number of active unique addresses as well as the number of transactions per day. This may allow us to paint a more accurate picture of the total number of true users as this would pertain to the number of wallets that are actually sending and receiving assets in any given day.

Using these metrics, Ethereum is still number one with an impressive 513,000 addresses compared to Bitcoins 443,000. It also soars ahead in terms of transactions with 832,000 compared to BTC 209,000.

The Flippening

Some say that these figures could be marking the beginning of something that is referred to as ‘the Flippening”- a term coined by the cult-like internet community that firmly believes Ethereum will dethrone Bitcoin in the near future.

Whilst most of this community consists of staunch backers of ETH, there could be some truth in their predictions. Recently Roger Ver, a prominent BTC investor and advocate said that he has every reason to believe that Ethereum has the potential to overtake Bitcoin by the end of 2018. Whilst this is just speculation, the numbers are difficult to dispute. Whilst the market cap of Ethereum only consists of around 44.7% of Bitcoins $167billion, it is undoubtedly outpacing the original ambition of blockchain technology.